Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy explains how Mobinuity ("we", "us", "our") handles your information when you use Thingly: Identify Anything (the "App"). Identifying a photograph needs a server to look at it, so we want to be exact about what leaves your phone, what happens to it, and what we keep. On that last point the answer is nothing.
1. The short version
- No account, no sign-up, no email collection.
- Your collection, your notes, and your photos stay on your device. We hold no copy.
- When you identify something, the photo is sent to our identification service, analysed, and discarded straight after the response. We do not store your photos.
- Location is off unless you turn it on, is rounded to roughly a hundred metres, stays on your phone, and is never sent with a scan.
- There are no ads in the App and no advertising identifiers are used.
- We do not sell personal data. Ever.
2. Your collection stays on your device
Everything Thingly keeps for you, meaning your finds, the photos of them, your notes, your favourites, your shelves and anything in the trash, is stored in a single local file and a folder of images on your device, protected by iOS file-level encryption. There is no account, no iCloud sync, and no copy on our servers. You can erase all of it at any time from Settings → Erase my collection, or by deleting the App.
3. Photos and how identification works
When you take or choose a photo and ask Thingly what it is, the App resizes the image and sends it over an encrypted connection to our identification service, which runs on Cloudflare Workers. That service passes the image to an AI model operated by Anthropic, receives the identification, and returns it to your phone. The photo is not written to disk or to any database on our side. It exists only for the seconds the request takes and is discarded when the response is sent.
To stop abuse and to cap our costs, the service counts how many requests each installation makes per day. That counter is keyed to a random identifier generated on your device. It is not linked to you, your Apple ID, or your other apps, and it is deleted automatically after two days.
If you ask a follow-up question about a find, the same photo and your question are sent the same way, and are discarded the same way.
4. Where you found something
Thingly can note roughly where you were when you made a find, so your collection doubles as a map. This is off by default and the App does not touch location services at all until you switch it on in Settings. When it is on:
- Coordinates are rounded to about three decimal places, roughly a hundred metres, so a find records a neighbourhood rather than an address.
- The place is stored on your device with the find, exactly like your notes.
- It is never included in the photo we send for identification, and we never receive it.
- Switching it off stops new finds recording a place. Existing ones keep theirs until you delete them.
5. No advertising, no tracking
The App contains no advertising and no advertising SDK. It does not read the device advertising identifier, does not track you across other companies' apps or websites, and never shows the App Tracking Transparency prompt because it has nothing to ask permission for.
6. Purchases
Subscriptions are sold and processed by Apple. We never see your payment details. We use RevenueCat to check whether a subscription is active; it receives an anonymous identifier and Apple's receipt, and nothing else about you.
7. Kid mode
Kid mode changes the answers the App gives: simpler words, no valuations, and nothing frightening. It does not change what data is collected, because in either mode that is the same: a photo that is discarded after it is answered.
8. What we do not collect
No name, no email, no phone number, no address, no contacts, no health data, no browsing history, and no copy of your collection. We do not build a profile of you, and there is no analytics SDK in the App.
9. Your choices and rights
You can erase your whole collection in one tap, revoke camera or photo access in iOS Settings, turn location off, or delete the App. Because we keep no copy of your collection and no copy of your photos, there is nothing on our side for us to export or erase. Your device is the only place your data lives.
10. Children
The App is not directed at children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age where you live), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Kid mode is a setting a parent can turn on for a child using the camera with them; it is not a children's category product.
11. Not expert advice
Identifications are estimates produced by an AI model from a photograph, and they can be wrong. They are offered for general interest and are not professional, medical, safety, or financial advice. In particular the App will not tell you whether any wild plant, berry or fungus is safe to eat, will not identify medication, and will not answer questions about anything on skin. Value ranges are rough figures for interest and are not an appraisal.
12. Contact
Questions about this policy or the App? Email support@mobinuity.com.
13. Changes to this policy
If we ever change how the App handles data, we will update this policy and the "Last updated" date above before the change ships. If we ever wanted to keep photos, for example to improve accuracy, that would be strictly opt-in and described here first.